DECEMBER 2008 NEWS
5 Ways to Smart Size Your Office
When looking at ways to decrease your office footprint or simply get more out of the space you have, an often overlooked option is smart-sizing your current office space. A lease is an expenditure that can have significant impact on bottom line, but smart-sizing offers organizations the opportunity to get creative in how they manage their space and ultimately save big money.
Consider the following approaches for smart-sizing your office space. Each one offers opportunities for increasing efficiencies and reducing energy and space costs.
It’s a buyer’s market: Seriously consider early lease renegotiation or renewal. Renegotiating your office lease early can earn you substantial savings via reduced rental payments or a substantial improvement allowance. In addition to the immediate decreased rental payments, early lease renegotiation can secure a company’s long term real estate needs at the present day’s low rates and terms, rather than taking a chance on future real estate markets.
Virtual office spaces: As work habits and transportation needs are evolving, virtual office spaces are a financially beneficial arrangement for a company. Utilizing typical office commodities on an “as-you-need” basis can help companies that may have a smaller number of employees and want the benefits of a private office space at a fraction of the price. Plus, many virtual office providers offer personal phone answering services, a mailing address and access to conference rooms.
Transfer paper files to electronic media: By cutting out the paper and shifting to electronic files, organizations can save hundreds of thousands of square feet of filing cabinets and filing rooms.
Space efficiency: Take, for example, the effect on saving space from the advanced design of the flat screen computer monitor. Before the advent of the flat screen for the desktop, employee workstations were standardized with a diagonal corner work-surface to place the deep housing of a standard tube-type computer monitor. As shown on the comparative diagrams below, this standard detail results in workstations that use 61.75 square feet. By contrast, the same diagram shows an equally functional workstation with square corners that is designed for flat screen monitors and uses only 48 square feet. The difference represents more than a 22% savings in workstation floor-space, with the same functionality. Isn’t that smart?
Energy savings: Using the example of the flat screen monitor above, you also can calculate the energy savings using current energy rates, since flat screen monitors use significantly less energy than traditional cathode ray tube monitors. The differences between CRT and LCD on power are robust enough to confirm that LCDs consume significantly less power when on than CRTs of similar size. On average, for monitors in our sample, 15” LCDs consume 30% as much power when on as 15” CRTs, and 17” LCDs consume 51% as much power when on as 17” CRTs. (http://enduse.lbl.gov/Info/LBNL-48581.pdf). This savings will only increase as energy costs go up.
In the current economic climate, smart-sizing can be the best decision a company can make for expanding the efficiency of its current office space or “making do” in a smaller office space. Whether you are able to take advantage of all of these smart-sizing approaches or only a few, you should see results. It should have a significant impact on the space you have to work with, as well as on energy and other incurred costs. Smart-sizing is one way to demonstrate responsibility as a business – to your employees, the company budget, and the environment.
Media Contact
Managing Director
Macon Raine, Inc.
Office: 630-221-9844
ben@maconraine.com